The pseudo-scientists, news reporters, and pundits purport to offer truth when they offer interpretation. And after a while, the average person doesn't know what to believe any more.
I wonder why you don't blame scientists as well?
It seems to me that science (as currently practiced) may have two major flaws. The first being that only notable results tend to be the most published and the most widespread, and the second is funding issues.
Both should bias data collection.
Funding issues alone are interesting. Assuming that scientists are as prone to bias as part of human nature, it shouldn't be hard to find scientists who unconsciously influence the outcome of their experiments so it's what they expect or hope. Combine that with a funding source that has its own biases in what it wants to investigate, and we might be able to get a chain of studies that indicate a falsehood as being true.
In the short term, the system can perpetuate a falsehood. In the long term, sooner or later that falsehood should contradict enough other science that isn't directly related in order to be revealed, but I'm not sure how long that would take.
Awhile back I read a book on big boom/busts in history, such at the Dutch tulip fiasco.
The author's opinion was that some market bubbles had positive effects. One of the examples he cites was the rise of railroads in (IIRC) 19th century England. For awhile, it seems like everyone wanted to put money into making railroad lines. So a ton of lines were created, the market went bust, the individual lines went broke, and the few remaining players were able to snatch up the lines they needed from the bankrupt investors.
In the short term, the bust was harmful, in the long term, the author stated that it helped create the modern railroad industry in England.
Don't know if I agree with it, but it was an interesting idea.
Boom/busts may be the equivalent of the precambrian explosion. Lots of interesting ideas are tried out, and only the fittest survive.
This is not everything that he has been accusing of.
" According to her statement, these include over-enthusiastic hugging and cheek-kissing, unwanted compliments about her physical appearance, lying to her about his qualifications, and spreading rumours about the special nature of his relationship with her and her husband."
I read that part, but bear in mind that the investigation does not show any collaborations of these claims.
He strikes me as a doctor who is overenthusiastic in his field, and doesn't understand that others may not share his same interest in behavioral psychology.
She strikes me as someone was was deeply offended by the article, decided his interest in it was creepy, and recast any prior experiences with him in that light.
But I could be wrong. All I have is the letters that were posted.
Except for NT having no concept of a superuser and Linux utterly dependent on one to implement nearly all aspects of a usable system.
Except for the finest granularity in Linux being the group and in NT the user.
Except for the utter nightmare in Linux trying to create exclusionary or complicated sets of permissions with multiple users and/or groups.
Except for the NT ACLs applying to nearly all objects in the OS, and in Linux only things represented in the filesystem.
Except for NT ACLs controlling nearly all ways to manipulate an object and in Linux being limited to read, write and execute.
While I agree with you that in theory, NT's permissions capabilities are more fine-grained and thus should provide a better security model than unix, in practice, I wonder if the complexity of NT's model commonly leads to bad implementations in practice.
There may be something to be said for simple & dumb.
Wouldn't it be rather pointless to encrypt any of the data that's kept in a database when said data is meant to be available to the software that's accessing that data?
Er, it makes things harder.
You lock the door to your residence, right? Even though any fool can break a window.
Think of this as something similar. If a database is encrypted, the backup tapes and any old drives from the DB server that are routinely discarded will not be useful for stealing data from.
I've been saying what Hawking is saying all along. It is sheer folly to think that an advance race went through all the trouble to cross many, many light-years of intergalactic space just to say "Hi".
What may seem like a huge concentration of energy and materials for us may be a trivial investment for a more advanced race.
Look at the modern computer. An insane amount of power. Imagine going back to 1940 and talking to mathematicians and scientists about the capabilities of a modern computer. Imagine what they would think its most likely use would be -- probably something to do with advanced research, cryptography, design, etc.
They probably won't guess "watching funny videos, chatting with random strangers, downloading porn".
While you have this time machine, pick up some random cheap crap at Walmart, adjust the prices to 1940 dollars, and then tell them that all this cheap crap was shipped all the way from China and across the continental US to be sold for $.99 or so.
We indeed understand a lot today about physics and cosmology, and nothing I've seen to this time would even hint at the merest possibility of anything that could possibly make interstellar travel "cheap and affordable" my mere civilizations throughout the cosmos.
With the time machine, go back further. Say about 2000 years ago. Show Romans some scrap iron. Should be easy enough to buy, around $350 or so for a metric ton. It's going to be worth a lot more in Roman times. Why? Did iron get magically easier to extract? Nope. Did it start to require less energy to refine? No. We just have a far greater amount of energy to us that the proportional amount of energy used is far, far less. And while yes, a lot of that energy is currently derived from fossil fuels, we could use several fission fuel cycles and breeder reactors and keep up the same amount of energy output for centuries before we have to deal with pesky problems such as extracting fissionable materials from sea water. And don't forget fusion, which we'll probably figure out sooner or later. We can sustain our current energy levels in theory for longer than the sun's usable lifespan.
Now imagine our energy output if we were harvesting materials from the entire solar system. Pretty damn impressive.
The marginal cost of launching small interstellar probes could be almost nothing to our race in the future. It could be the equivalent of a high school science project "Your task: Design self-replicating machinery to find Oort-cloud objects of reasonable size and composition, use the hydrogen for fusion energy, and transform the object into a factory that will launch life-detecting probes traveling at >.1c towards the 100 nearest stars. Projects will be graded based on speed of the probes, efficiency of the plant, and AI of the probes."
There's certainly a very logical argument for buying things like food locally and that's carbon emissions. Weather you believe that global warming is happening or not, carbon emissions cost money. Period. Burning petroleum, coal, or uranium to bring tasty fish from the north pacific to New York city costs money. Buying oranges grown around the corner from your house costs less money. Due to a wide variety of subsidies, relaxed environmental regulation and a whole host of other factors we don't really see the cost of imported food.
Does this apply to most foods?
What's the CO2 emissions from a orange shipped from Florida to New York via rail or cargo ship?
What's the CO2 emissions from a orange grown in a greenhouse in New York?
A quick google search shows that a ton of freight can be moved 410 miles per gallon of diesel in a freight train. A river barge has a similar efficiency. A large ocean going cargo ship appears to be double that efficiency, while a small cargo ship is about the same.
A semi-truck can move a ton 180 miles per gallon of diesel.
A pickup is probably around 10 miles per gallon of gasoline, if you're lucky (assuming 3/4 ton truck with decent fuel efficiency).
Eating locally has benefits, but CO2 impact might not be one of them.
Most people are ruining their bodies one way or another. As long as they are ruining their bodies in a conventional way, society is more or less fine with it.
It's those who are ruining their bodies in less conventional ways that society wants to single out.
For example, society has very little trouble with those who drive to work, have a desk job, drive home, eat dinner and watch TV.
The amount of exercise that person has is minimal, and that will have health costs, but since its "normal", we accept it, more or less.
I'm imagening, as they used caves for living and spoiling a decent cave giving protection and housing was used as a "burial" or dumpster is unlikely, the cave was uninhabitable by humans for one or another reason. A likely scenario seems to be that the young and unknowingly couple ran off to have some funky frisky time, ended up in a cave inhabited by preditors and got owned. A predator yet unknown, but one that can eat animals from the size of a mouse up to a sabretooth tiger without biting marks.
As there are no biting marks or "scavenging", or disallowing inhabitation it must've been a might impressive beast eating those creatures without teeth. I propose a blob of ooze or slime which liquified, slowly and horribly, those creatures alive while holding them down with their tentacles of doom while floating in the air with lighteningbols-shooting eyes.
Heres a novel idea, spend the extra 0.0001% to put a sidewalk in right next to the automobile road for these people. Hell put one for bikes and another one for pedestrians if your concerned about safety, the cost of laying a sidewalk or two is nothing compared to the cost of laying a good road surface
Except that statistically, bike paths that parallel roads may be quite a bit more unsafe than the cyclist being on the road, due to turning drivers not checking for objects moving 20 mph or so on the side path in the same direction as the turning automobile.
The "solution" for this is to put a stop sign for the cyclist at any crossing.
Now imagine a road that has a stop sign every block. How many automobile drivers would choose that route? Very few. And an automobile driver has the advantage of being lazy and letting the car's engine accelerate every block.
A path that parallels a street can be a good choice for recreational cyclists who are traveling slowly and don't have any specific destination in mind, especially in the suburbs where there are fewer intersections. But these paths frequently are poor choices for utility and commuting cyclists.
Plus, for the paths to be useful year-round, they have to be maintained year-round. That includes snow plowing. It is interesting to note that Minneapolis, which is neck-to-neck with Portland for the percentage of cyclist commuters, plows its major offstreet paths in winter, and tends to be very quick at doing so.
But outside of interstates and restricted-access roadways, roads are used by more than just automobile drivers.
Buses are stopping and going, pedestrians are walking to work or going shopping, people are parking, deliveries are being made, and cyclists and motorcyclists are going about their daily business.
There is a benefit for making streets usable for everyone -- it increases the livability of a community, reduces urban sprawl (and the associated financial and environmental costs), and allows the elderly and disable to live more independent lives.
Now before someone starts ranting about how they pay tax on gas and thus roads should only be for cars, the gax tax does not come anywhere close to funding roads in the US -- a large portion of the money needed to maintain and build roadways comes from property taxes and the general fund.
Funny, I lost 40 lbs eating high-fat low-carb food, purposely not exercising, and eating whenever I was hungry. And my blood pressure went down to normal from its high of 145/95, so I could stop taking blood pressure medication as well. I'm healthier than I've ever been.
yes, its sort of the atkins diet, or the caveman diet: its how our caveman ancestors spent pretty much their entire lives, its what our biochemistry is idealized for, pre-agricultural revolution
all it means is you eat fat and protein, and no carbohydrates. the pounds melt right off
Quick question. Were digging sticks put in the archeological record by the Flying Spaghetti Monster in order to test our faith in Atkins?
Or were our ancestors smart enough to realize that roots and tubers were a good source of calories?
I think you're focusing too much on the _hunting_ side of hunter-gatherers.
PS: I'm also pretty sure that the food the hunters got tended to be a lot lower fat than our modern factory-farmed animals. Many of our modern farm animals put on weight at an amazing rate, and have no exercise. Some of the most common breeds used in factory farms can't physically breed any more, that's how far removed from nature they are. Heck, some of the modern breeds are physically unable to survive without climate control.
but now you pay for it in the most common sense direct way
I was unaware that the current health insurance reform bill mandated that insurance companies remove all caps to coverage, all limitations to coverage, and have a $0 deductible.
Oh wait...
Yippie. We still have a lot of the downside of the old system, but now we're mandated to give them more money.
And now we the creators need legislation to stop this tyranny of the majority, and we are going to get it. If this wasn't important compared to the other freedoms you are about to lose, you would stop.
I did stop. I stopped buying any new music from RIAA members. I'll pick up the occasional RIAA-member-produced album used, but never new. Luckily, there are independent music publishing houses, and they are getting most of my money now.
If the copyright treaty passes, I'll make sure not to buy music from any organization that sponsored it.
I'm not interested in paying others to trample a free internet.
These things are really saving lives by not slamming into trees when your car would suddenly start spinning on a slippery surface, as it would when you did not have ESC installed.
Are they saving lives? Or by making roads feel "safer", do drivers end up driving at higher speeds, negating the safety benefits? Do drivers end up making other decisions that negatively impact their safety such as driving on worn tires instead of buying new tires appropriate to the conditions?
Lawn is for shitty places where developers crap out houses onto postage stamp sized lots.
There's nothing wrong with a small lot. For the majority of homeowners, having a yard that's large enough for a patio, a BBQ and a small garden is probably more than enough to meet their average needs.
If you want to question lawns, question the people who think they need two acres of weed-free lawn that they are unlikely to step on outside of mowing it.
I trust nuclear power. I do not trust the people responsible for providing it, or the people responsible for overseeing them. They are all blinded by money.
Is this different from any other industry?
I would expect that the Chinese firms that make solar panel have pretty lax guidelines for disposal of the hazardous materials needed to make solar panels. I'd expect the mining companies that come up with the metals needed for wind mills and the additional power lines have some pretty horrendous practices as well. There have been hydroelectric dam failures. And heck, you don't even want to know the estimated number of deaths per year from a properly working coal power plant.
Is there any reason that nuclear power should be any different from the others?
More than likely they hope to bury it. It's not exactly a shining-star moment in the Olympics. I'm sure they'd prefer people forgot about it and moved on.
I've heard a theory that compared this crash to crashes in motorcycle racing: Due to the additional safety equipment motorcycle racers wear, as well as courses designed so they can slide or roll when they wipe out, motorcycle racers tend to survive crashes. While in the Olympic event, the course was poorly designed from the aspect of safety, and the support beam that the athlete hit shouldn't have been there.
Perhaps the Olympic committee doesn't want people questioning what they have done for safety of participating athletes.
As opposed to what? Somebody else trading 15 hours of THEIR life simply so YOU can live a healthy life? That's the part that sounds like indentured servitude to me. Oh my gosh! You have to work 30 hours a week to pay for the food and lodging you and your family need, simply to stay alive? Oh, the horror! You want the benefits of medical care, you pay for the benefits of medical care. Why should money I earn be taxed and used to pay for benefits for you? Indentured servitude is what I'm experiencing when 40% of my paycheck goes to pay for medical care and other services for OTHER people besides myself and my family.
Actually, in America, per-capita healthcare costs are thousands of dollars higher than countries such as Canada or the UK.
So we're all spending more on healthcare, but our coverage is less, and we don't live as long.
If we could make our system as efficient as Canada's, we'd spend less and everyone would have coverage.
Unfortunately, the Democrat's plans seem to be extending our existing bloated system to cover more people.
And the Republicans will occasionally give lip service to healthcare costs, but don't seem interested in acting on it.
I've seen that, but it generally results from a misunderstanding of the rules perpetuated by white supremacist groups, and Republicans. It's not that minorities can't be racist or that women can't be sexist, it's that there's less harm resulting when a minority engages in it than when somebody in the majority does. (Although that doesn't really explain women since they make up the majority of eligible voters and vote down their own interests anyways)
Women (and men) who support traditional gender roles can engage in a lot of harm. Look at how culturally appropriate it is to think that women make better parents.
Collisions between pedestrians and autos are overwhelmingly more often the pedestrian's fault. In fact, one study suggests that around half of pedestrian vehicle fatalities involve a ped under the influence of alcohol (scroll for it... lots of good info there, though.) More tidbits from there: The single largest contributor to vehicle-ped collisions is where the ped "ran into road" (At 15% of cases) while the most common contributor on the part of drivers is "failed to yield to ped".
In a fatal auto/ped collision, is the pedestrian around to tell their side of the story?
I'm not saying that the automobile driver is consciously lying. But perhaps that pedestrian that came out from nowhere was actually operating in a predictable manner, and the driver of the automobile was zoning out/fiddling with the radio/trying to remember what else he had to pick up at the corner store.
As a cyclist, at night, my bike has a bright headlight, a dimmer flashing front white light, and a rear (flashing) red light. I also wear an ANSI Class-2 safety vest. I've had situations where I've stopped at a four way stop, seen a car coming from the left (not stopped yet). I start going through the intersection as the driver stops, and then the driver starts moving through the intersection again before noticing me and stopping again.
The driver isn't out to kill me. He or she only looked for something approximately car-sized before moving again. If they hadn't seen me before hitting me, I wouldn't be surprised if I appeared to come out of nowhere, and therefore *must* have run the stop sign. I've also had people try to merge into my lane without seeing me. Again, I'm sure I appear to have come out of nowhere.
As a pedestrian, I've had similar occurances. Someone is so focused on catching that break in the traffic for a left turn that they neglect to check the crosswalk. Or the light turned red a second ago, and they are running late to work, there is no cross traffic from the left, and it's only a right turn.
THAT is the problem that biking to work faces. and looking at ALL my coworkers, maybe 3 of them can survive a 10 mile bike ride the rest would be dead on the side of the road barely able to breathe after 3 miles. Silly part is, the 3 that can survive all are 40 somethings the 20 somethings are all horribly out of shape drinking their latte' with extra whipped cream.
That's not a problem that bicycling commuting faces.
That's a problem that your coworkers face.
Really, if you are in your 20s, and a 3 mile bike ride is your body's limit, you either have some horrific genetic abnormality, or you have made bad life choices.
What are you on about? The US is by far the biggest produce of foodstuffs in the world. They've been a net exporter for food for a long time. I know it is fashionable in some circles to think everything comes from exploited people elsewhere but that simply isn't the case. Food comes from high tech, efficient, agriculture. The US produces mass amounts.
Assuming that America dedicated all its cropland for food for human production (instead of growing most of its food as animal feed) America produces enough food to feed the entire world.
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I wonder why you don't blame scientists as well?
It seems to me that science (as currently practiced) may have two major flaws. The first being that only notable results tend to be the most published and the most widespread, and the second is funding issues.
Both should bias data collection.
Funding issues alone are interesting. Assuming that scientists are as prone to bias as part of human nature, it shouldn't be hard to find scientists who unconsciously influence the outcome of their experiments so it's what they expect or hope. Combine that with a funding source that has its own biases in what it wants to investigate, and we might be able to get a chain of studies that indicate a falsehood as being true.
In the short term, the system can perpetuate a falsehood. In the long term, sooner or later that falsehood should contradict enough other science that isn't directly related in order to be revealed, but I'm not sure how long that would take.
Awhile back I read a book on big boom/busts in history, such at the Dutch tulip fiasco.
The author's opinion was that some market bubbles had positive effects. One of the examples he cites was the rise of railroads in (IIRC) 19th century England. For awhile, it seems like everyone wanted to put money into making railroad lines. So a ton of lines were created, the market went bust, the individual lines went broke, and the few remaining players were able to snatch up the lines they needed from the bankrupt investors.
In the short term, the bust was harmful, in the long term, the author stated that it helped create the modern railroad industry in England.
Don't know if I agree with it, but it was an interesting idea.
Boom/busts may be the equivalent of the precambrian explosion. Lots of interesting ideas are tried out, and only the fittest survive.
I read that part, but bear in mind that the investigation does not show any collaborations of these claims.
He strikes me as a doctor who is overenthusiastic in his field, and doesn't understand that others may not share his same interest in behavioral psychology.
She strikes me as someone was was deeply offended by the article, decided his interest in it was creepy, and recast any prior experiences with him in that light.
But I could be wrong. All I have is the letters that were posted.
While I agree with you that in theory, NT's permissions capabilities are more fine-grained and thus should provide a better security model than unix, in practice, I wonder if the complexity of NT's model commonly leads to bad implementations in practice.
There may be something to be said for simple & dumb.
Er, it makes things harder.
You lock the door to your residence, right? Even though any fool can break a window.
Think of this as something similar. If a database is encrypted, the backup tapes and any old drives from the DB server that are routinely discarded will not be useful for stealing data from.
What may seem like a huge concentration of energy and materials for us may be a trivial investment for a more advanced race.
Look at the modern computer. An insane amount of power. Imagine going back to 1940 and talking to mathematicians and scientists about the capabilities of a modern computer. Imagine what they would think its most likely use would be -- probably something to do with advanced research, cryptography, design, etc.
They probably won't guess "watching funny videos, chatting with random strangers, downloading porn".
While you have this time machine, pick up some random cheap crap at Walmart, adjust the prices to 1940 dollars, and then tell them that all this cheap crap was shipped all the way from China and across the continental US to be sold for $.99 or so.
With the time machine, go back further. Say about 2000 years ago. Show Romans some scrap iron. Should be easy enough to buy, around $350 or so for a metric ton. It's going to be worth a lot more in Roman times. Why? Did iron get magically easier to extract? Nope. Did it start to require less energy to refine? No. We just have a far greater amount of energy to us that the proportional amount of energy used is far, far less. And while yes, a lot of that energy is currently derived from fossil fuels, we could use several fission fuel cycles and breeder reactors and keep up the same amount of energy output for centuries before we have to deal with pesky problems such as extracting fissionable materials from sea water. And don't forget fusion, which we'll probably figure out sooner or later. We can sustain our current energy levels in theory for longer than the sun's usable lifespan.
Now imagine our energy output if we were harvesting materials from the entire solar system. Pretty damn impressive.
The marginal cost of launching small interstellar probes could be almost nothing to our race in the future. It could be the equivalent of a high school science project "Your task: Design self-replicating machinery to find Oort-cloud objects of reasonable size and composition, use the hydrogen for fusion energy, and transform the object into a factory that will launch life-detecting probes traveling at >.1c towards the 100 nearest stars. Projects will be graded based on speed of the probes, efficiency of the plant, and AI of the probes."
Does this apply to most foods?
What's the CO2 emissions from a orange shipped from Florida to New York via rail or cargo ship?
What's the CO2 emissions from a orange grown in a greenhouse in New York?
A quick google search shows that a ton of freight can be moved 410 miles per gallon of diesel in a freight train. A river barge has a similar efficiency. A large ocean going cargo ship appears to be double that efficiency, while a small cargo ship is about the same.
A semi-truck can move a ton 180 miles per gallon of diesel.
A pickup is probably around 10 miles per gallon of gasoline, if you're lucky (assuming 3/4 ton truck with decent fuel efficiency).
Eating locally has benefits, but CO2 impact might not be one of them.
Most people are ruining their bodies one way or another. As long as they are ruining their bodies in a conventional way, society is more or less fine with it.
It's those who are ruining their bodies in less conventional ways that society wants to single out.
For example, society has very little trouble with those who drive to work, have a desk job, drive home, eat dinner and watch TV.
The amount of exercise that person has is minimal, and that will have health costs, but since its "normal", we accept it, more or less.
Oh goodie. Shoggoths.
Except that statistically, bike paths that parallel roads may be quite a bit more unsafe than the cyclist being on the road, due to turning drivers not checking for objects moving 20 mph or so on the side path in the same direction as the turning automobile.
The "solution" for this is to put a stop sign for the cyclist at any crossing.
Now imagine a road that has a stop sign every block. How many automobile drivers would choose that route? Very few. And an automobile driver has the advantage of being lazy and letting the car's engine accelerate every block.
A path that parallels a street can be a good choice for recreational cyclists who are traveling slowly and don't have any specific destination in mind, especially in the suburbs where there are fewer intersections. But these paths frequently are poor choices for utility and commuting cyclists.
Plus, for the paths to be useful year-round, they have to be maintained year-round. That includes snow plowing. It is interesting to note that Minneapolis, which is neck-to-neck with Portland for the percentage of cyclist commuters, plows its major offstreet paths in winter, and tends to be very quick at doing so.
But outside of interstates and restricted-access roadways, roads are used by more than just automobile drivers.
Buses are stopping and going, pedestrians are walking to work or going shopping, people are parking, deliveries are being made, and cyclists and motorcyclists are going about their daily business.
There is a benefit for making streets usable for everyone -- it increases the livability of a community, reduces urban sprawl (and the associated financial and environmental costs), and allows the elderly and disable to live more independent lives.
Now before someone starts ranting about how they pay tax on gas and thus roads should only be for cars, the gax tax does not come anywhere close to funding roads in the US -- a large portion of the money needed to maintain and build roadways comes from property taxes and the general fund.
"Purposely not exercising"?
Why would you do that?
Quick question. Were digging sticks put in the archeological record by the Flying Spaghetti Monster in order to test our faith in Atkins?
Or were our ancestors smart enough to realize that roots and tubers were a good source of calories?
I think you're focusing too much on the _hunting_ side of hunter-gatherers.
PS: I'm also pretty sure that the food the hunters got tended to be a lot lower fat than our modern factory-farmed animals. Many of our modern farm animals put on weight at an amazing rate, and have no exercise. Some of the most common breeds used in factory farms can't physically breed any more, that's how far removed from nature they are. Heck, some of the modern breeds are physically unable to survive without climate control.
I was unaware that the current health insurance reform bill mandated that insurance companies remove all caps to coverage, all limitations to coverage, and have a $0 deductible.
Oh wait...
Yippie. We still have a lot of the downside of the old system, but now we're mandated to give them more money.
I did stop. I stopped buying any new music from RIAA members. I'll pick up the occasional RIAA-member-produced album used, but never new. Luckily, there are independent music publishing houses, and they are getting most of my money now.
If the copyright treaty passes, I'll make sure not to buy music from any organization that sponsored it.
I'm not interested in paying others to trample a free internet.
Are they saving lives? Or by making roads feel "safer", do drivers end up driving at higher speeds, negating the safety benefits? Do drivers end up making other decisions that negatively impact their safety such as driving on worn tires instead of buying new tires appropriate to the conditions?
There's nothing wrong with a small lot. For the majority of homeowners, having a yard that's large enough for a patio, a BBQ and a small garden is probably more than enough to meet their average needs.
If you want to question lawns, question the people who think they need two acres of weed-free lawn that they are unlikely to step on outside of mowing it.
Silly. That's what they *want* you to think.
This is really due to a vast CIA conspiracy to promote the sales of big pharm.
Is this different from any other industry?
I would expect that the Chinese firms that make solar panel have pretty lax guidelines for disposal of the hazardous materials needed to make solar panels. I'd expect the mining companies that come up with the metals needed for wind mills and the additional power lines have some pretty horrendous practices as well. There have been hydroelectric dam failures. And heck, you don't even want to know the estimated number of deaths per year from a properly working coal power plant.
Is there any reason that nuclear power should be any different from the others?
I've heard a theory that compared this crash to crashes in motorcycle racing: Due to the additional safety equipment motorcycle racers wear, as well as courses designed so they can slide or roll when they wipe out, motorcycle racers tend to survive crashes. While in the Olympic event, the course was poorly designed from the aspect of safety, and the support beam that the athlete hit shouldn't have been there.
Perhaps the Olympic committee doesn't want people questioning what they have done for safety of participating athletes.
Actually, in America, per-capita healthcare costs are thousands of dollars higher than countries such as Canada or the UK.
So we're all spending more on healthcare, but our coverage is less, and we don't live as long.
If we could make our system as efficient as Canada's, we'd spend less and everyone would have coverage.
Unfortunately, the Democrat's plans seem to be extending our existing bloated system to cover more people.
And the Republicans will occasionally give lip service to healthcare costs, but don't seem interested in acting on it.
Women (and men) who support traditional gender roles can engage in a lot of harm. Look at how culturally appropriate it is to think that women make better parents.
In a fatal auto/ped collision, is the pedestrian around to tell their side of the story?
I'm not saying that the automobile driver is consciously lying. But perhaps that pedestrian that came out from nowhere was actually operating in a predictable manner, and the driver of the automobile was zoning out/fiddling with the radio/trying to remember what else he had to pick up at the corner store.
As a cyclist, at night, my bike has a bright headlight, a dimmer flashing front white light, and a rear (flashing) red light. I also wear an ANSI Class-2 safety vest. I've had situations where I've stopped at a four way stop, seen a car coming from the left (not stopped yet). I start going through the intersection as the driver stops, and then the driver starts moving through the intersection again before noticing me and stopping again.
The driver isn't out to kill me. He or she only looked for something approximately car-sized before moving again. If they hadn't seen me before hitting me, I wouldn't be surprised if I appeared to come out of nowhere, and therefore *must* have run the stop sign. I've also had people try to merge into my lane without seeing me. Again, I'm sure I appear to have come out of nowhere.
As a pedestrian, I've had similar occurances. Someone is so focused on catching that break in the traffic for a left turn that they neglect to check the crosswalk. Or the light turned red a second ago, and they are running late to work, there is no cross traffic from the left, and it's only a right turn.
That's not a problem that bicycling commuting faces.
That's a problem that your coworkers face.
Really, if you are in your 20s, and a 3 mile bike ride is your body's limit, you either have some horrific genetic abnormality, or you have made bad life choices.
Assuming that America dedicated all its cropland for food for human production (instead of growing most of its food as animal feed) America produces enough food to feed the entire world.